Books by "Mary Jean Corbett"
4 books found
The Kiss ("When the Sun with amorous beams")
"Iconoclastic Departures contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of Mary Shelley as a professional author in her own right with a lifelong commitment to the development of her craft. Many of its essays acknowledge the importance of her family to her work - the steady theme of much earlier scholarship - but for them the family has become an imperative socio-psychological context within which to better understand her innovations in the many literary forms she worked with during her career: journals, letters, travelogues, biographies, poems, dramas, tales, and novels." "The book's essays also convey the conviction that even if Mary Shelley, after Percy Shelley's death, gradually retired from public life as his relatives wished, she retained a resiliently resistant attitude toward many of the established orders of her day, easily recovered by a careful look beyond her "feelings" to the productions of her literary "imagination."" "The Mary Shelley who inhabits this three-part collection of portraits is a radical, even if a quiet radical. Part 1 focuses on various moments in her construction of her authorial identity; parts 2 and 3 anatomize the nature of her resistance and her innovation. She is presented as a writer who reappropriates authority for herself, who redesigns genres, who redefines gender, who rewrites history and biography, who revises her readers' aesthetic expectations, and who protests cultural imperialism at home and abroad. It seems significant to the contributors to this volume that this new, radical Mary Shelley was not invented by a pointed call for papers but emerged spontaneously from an open invitation to scholars working in various corners of the English-speaking world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.
Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.